Ok. It has been a while since I have posted on this analysis blog. I just spent a week at the Illustration Master Class for 2009 and I feel as if the things I learned last year, I put to use, mostly in the realm of compositional development. However, what I have learned is that I still have a ways to go in dealing with lighting color and temperature and how they help define forms and relations in space. So, I will now being choosing illustrations from history (inspired by Charles Vess and his history of illustration presentation). Today is a piece by Adolph Menzel. In this piece, Menzel chooses what I deem a simple light source/color temperature schema. He has his lights coming directly from the right, illuminating all the forms in the room. The lights are warm in yellows and reds and the shadows appear cool in blues and raw umbers. However, the more I stare at it, the less sure of my assessment I am. So I take the piece into MS Paint and run the color selector over areas of the painting and what I find is that the areas I thought were cool shadows appear to be created with warm tones. The purples are on the reddish side rather than the bluish side. The umbers are more burnt than raw and the shadows on the golden object are ochres. I believe that the color difference is coming from relative local temperature in that the shadows appear cooler in relation to the warmer highlights, but taken by themselves are still on the warm end of the scale. I think Menzel may have done this to create an open and airy feeling in this large room, whereas cooler shadows may have made it more dramatic. Interesting…
I wonder if this is some of what Greg and Scott were talking about to me in terms of unity of colors? To pull some of your reds into the blues, some of the blues into the reds, and then the whole piece reads more unified and part of an atmosphere rather than separate pieces glopped together on the same page? Hmmm. Stuff to ponder.
Glad you are posting more of these! It's really helpful and thought-provoking. 🙂
If you have the whole list of artists Charles surveyed, maybe you could do an analysis of each of them? I missed his history lecture. No one called to wake me up!!! Next year I sleep 3am-10am…
Charles is supposed to email some of us the list. Once I get it, I will use it to find images. In the meantime, I am working from a history of illustration list from the Society of Illustrators and picking ones that work with this current lighting/temperature study.
Oh and Blaze, comments like yours that show not only am I learning things myself but that other people are finding them useful just energizes me to want to keep it up. Thanks for that!